Sleepwalking into the darkness

Venal and rent-seeking elites are a global phenomenon, but most countries don’t have to deal with the lack of imagination and basic incompetence that Pakistanis do. Every day the evidence continues to mount.

Last week, the unelected, caretaker commerce minister repeated the delusional $100 billion target for exports with a self-referential announcement that would make even the most indulgent narcissist blush.

Over the weekend, the caretaker chief minister of Punjab announced a plan to improve air quality without disrupting the flow of traffic. His brilliant climate-altering solution is to hose down the entire city of Lahore with four teams of one hundred cleaners each, using high pressure water jet streams to reduce ‘dust’.

Advocates of privatization in Pakistan argue, with no sense of irony, that the task of privatizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) must be conducted urgently – with one caveat: it must ensure job security for the low skilled, burdensome labour employed by those SOEs (in short, retain the one facet of SOEs that is the definitive reason for why privatisation has become so urgent).

The federal government continues at least a quarter century run of borrowing valuable dollar-denominated money from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to, among other things, help the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) raise more revenue, in… you guessed it: rupees, from… you guessed it: salaried middle-class suckers and the helpless and growing ranks of GST-paying poor people.

“You’re talking **** for the hell of it

Addicted to betrayal, but you’re relevant

You’re terrified to look down

‘Cause if you dare, you’ll see the glare

Of everyone you burned just to get there

It’s coming back around” – Taylor Swift, 2022

Among the political and military elite, the delusions of normalization of ties with India continue to be the primary layer of new ideas: except that this is one new idea that is as old as Pakistan itself.

In the bargain, India has rewarded this idea with its occupation and annexation of Kashmir, the murder of thousands of innocent Kashmiris, the expansion of a global network of terrorists and terrorism financing targeting vulnerable aspects of Pakistan’s polity, the use of Afghanistan as a staging ground for violent extremist actors targeting Pakistani soldiers and the weaponization of UNSC 1267 through both a sustained campaign of South Block revisionist fictions, and material measures such as the grey list sanctions that the FATF has imposed twice in the last decade and a half.

Despite all this, Pakistan’s elite wants to restore the now dead and buried ‘composite dialogue’ format with India. Of course, India’s ‘peaceful’ intentions don’t end with the lawfare, information operations, legalised occupation and annexation in the boardrooms and on the airwaves. They cut deeper.

Errant BrahMos missiles, aerial attacks into Balakot, so-called surgical strikes across the border, and constant LOC fire on the ground are all meant to signal the seriousness of India’s capability to enact ‘Cold Start’ operations as and when India chooses. Here too Pakistani elites insist on burying their heads in the sand.

Perhaps the most obvious of India’s actions that signal its intentions are the most meaningless of them – efforts to exclude Pakistan and Pakistanis from the world cricket calendar, bans on Pakistani entertainers and artists from partaking in India’s massive domestic consumption market and attempting to exclude Pakistani leaders at every turn at international fora.

It is with this same India with whom Pakistani elites want to reach some kind of bargain. Right-wing, hatred-laced, historically delusional national discourses do not make for good dance partners – but this is difficult to explain to boomers who are stuck in 1999.

“I do the same thing I told you that I never would

I told you I’d change, even when I knew I never could

I know that I can’t find nobody else as good as you

I need you to stay, need you to stay” – Justin Bieber, 2021

The SIFC is supposed to be the new stability play through which the most important sectors and agendas in the country will be protected from the travails of whatever this version of democracy is going to manufacture on February 8, 2024.

The larger question might be who will protect the SIFC from the Pakistani elite’s insatiable appetite for mediocrity and incompetence. There is a long list of countries that struggle to get from point A to point B capably. But how many countries have sought to establish sovereign wealth funds without fund managers, financing bridge mechanisms without finance professionals, and deal-making vehicles without the capacity to engage in even the most basic conversations about how to conduct credible valuations?

Ask questions about how to engage in due diligence and how to negotiate realistic long-term contracts and prices that will protect taxpayers today and deep into the future – and there will be few answers. Very little indicates how the country will overcome the large capacity gap between the best and the brightest available within the republic’s job-security assured human resources and the counterparts they must interact with at the PIF, AIDA, QIA, Mubadla, Temasek, BII, DFC, and elsewhere.

Investors – both at home and abroad – are not as stupid as the Pakistani elites. They follow how the tax authorities in Pakistan try to bully the largest investors in Pakistan – the country’s telecom companies – into paying more taxes by locking the offices of telcos. They see how multinationals are prevented from taking their money abroad by finance ministers obsessed with fictional notions of low exchange rates.

They see how the most important and largest privatization in the country’s history stands incomplete – a full 17 years after the Etisalat deal for PTCL was signed. When the commerce minister of the same country promotes fictions like $100 billion in exports – and is rewarded with glowing coverage for doing so – those watching the circus are laughing. The really polite ones do so whilst they take off from Islamabad Airport. Most don’t wait that long.

“I just pulled up in a big body,

I got a lot of money coming in,

I just got off the phone with my demon

and he told me that I’m gonna win” – Drake, 2023

Serious people have spent nearly the last two years thinking carefully about how the country can find a path to exit from a state of permanent polycrisis. The traditional wave of optimism that seizes the discourse after a cataclysm hasn’t yet caught on – outside of some very carefully curated bubbles.

In part, this is because there is both the delusion and the realism that the cataclysm isn’t over yet. The delusion of this is anchored in young people’s absolute disgust with how politics has been manipulated for the duration of their entire lives. The realism of this is that the overarching authority in the country – unlike previous versions of such authority – is not invested in the personal image or the adulation of the madding crowd.

The only realistic bridge between an immovable overarching authority in the country and the unhappy cohort of Pakistanis that suffer numerous hardships in this polycrisis is transformational economic reform.

“My team is losing, battered and bruising

I see the high fives between the bad guys

Leave with my head hung, you are the only one

Who seems to care

American stories burning before me

I’m feeling helpless, the damsels are depressed

Boys will be boys then, where are the wise men?” – Taylor Swift, 2019

It is exactly this gap that is the most perplexing and worrying of all. Democratic rights, free expression and even basic rule of law questions can be left unanswered as they have in fits and starts throughout the last seven decades. There are hardly any takers for these – East or West. The difference between places that will barely survive and places that will thrive is economic growth.

The places that will thrive are already focused on life sciences, artificial intelligence, organic seed technology, water-scarce agricultural innovation, climate adaptation, materials sciences, data science and analytics driven public sector service provision, supply chain innovation, bespoke content consumption, and escalation on the manufacturing value chain.

The places that will barely survive? They are sleepwalking into the darkness.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.